Eileen ended her blog post with reference to the (increasing?) inversion of Henry Jenkins' describing fan activities as textual poaching: "The rapidity with which fan labor and content is co-opted opens a question of what cultural 'poaching' even looks like today, when so often, it is the franchises and corporations who are poaching from us (Jenkins 471)." This dynamic, which Eileen sets up and articulates nicely, is also on my mind in thinking through issues of fandom—facilitated in no small part by digital media ecosystems which "democratize" content creation (a word of which we should be skeptical in both its veracity and its connotations), the labor of fans is all the more immediately subsumed back into the omnivorous sphere of shows and franchises' "original" hegemonic authors/distributors. However, my language here suggests (as Jenkins does) that textual poaching, prior to its recuperation, succeeds in discarding the hegemonic frame of the material and its creators. There's a crude if compelling pre/post-social media split to think about here: if the labor of fandom is happening in the always-already corporately prescribed sites of Web 2.0, there's an infrastructural facilitation of this recuperation in the affordances of, say, quote tweeting, reframing under the blue checkmarked hegemons of textual authority previous efforts to reframe outside of it. But again: I presuppose an investment and a qualified success in fan activity moving beyond the "original" hegemonic frame. The digital recuperation of fan labor, the extraction of its surplus, might read as less of a novel phenomenon if we apply pressure to the notion that fan activity indeed succeeds, or even invests in, sustaining a world textual or political beyond the hegemony of the source material. That is, how much might a Kirk/Spock ship truly invert the structures of textual authority, as opposed to demonstrating a remarkable fungibility to a (televisual) textual frame that readily recuperates and subsumes even those remediations of its world that might read as radical change?
Pursuing this line of questioning means taking seriously a political valence to the question of (especially televisual) authorship as a practice of world-making that clearly begets, via fan activity, an interest in, at least, altering (reforming) its terms. The split Jenkins notes between the differing attitudes towards fandom (read, towards flexibility in the notion of a hegemonic textual-authorial frame) between Roddenberry on the one hand and Paramount on the other already gestures, however obliquely and simplistically, toward an imbrication of this question with that of capital: the pluralist, liberal-minded Roddenberry welcomes a plurality of liberal readings of Star Trek's textual world; the textual-authoritarian, profit-minded Paramount sees a threat to profit, if not (implicitly?) to textual authority, in the possibility of democratizing ownership of the decision-making processes in Star Trek's world-state.
Certain questions, in either case, are not asked. The liberals of the Roddenberry reform school of fanzines, however ambivalently welcoming of Kirk/Spock, circle around questions of what Jenkins notes some fans (quite alarmingly) refer to as "character rape" (487), maintaining, even in questions of acceptable degrees of incremental change, an author/ity to the original construction of the text/world/state, equating violation of its terms with assault. (The gendered connotations of the language here are worth pausing on: what, in the vernacular, other than women, do we see as at risk of "rape" if not the sovereignty of a people's claim to their land, a pairing—Mother Russia, Lady Liberty—so often similarly gendered?) Certain guiding principles of textual sovereignty are unchallenged, principles which I want to argue, however provisionally, align considerably with those of empire. Star Trek, Star Wars, the MCU, and Scandal, colloquially our three examples of fan culture closest at hand plus one ostensible counter-example explored by this week's readings, each take up manifestations of imperial power, American by name in all but Star Wars and by connotation in all four. Each, moreover, negotiates a certain version of a liberal engagement with power structures that we might understand as consonant with their historical moments (from "decolonization" to the "end of history"): Star Wars posits a big bad fascist Other against whom American empire constitutes itself and morally guarantees its claims to overseas/offworld authority, Star Trek and Marvel continue the increasingly diverse project of manifest destiny into the final frontier, Scandal's "post-race" intrigue is sited within the White House. It's easier to imagine Kirk/Spock than it is to imagine the USS Enterprise calling it a day.
I want to suggest, with considerable argumentative allowance for the short form of this blog post, that the practice of fandom is consonant with these textual sites that manifest continuities of imperial power. There is a resonance I've worked to elaborate between the presuppositions of fandom and liberalism, both of which are reliant, in their investment in pluralisms of identity, upon the author/itarianism of the hegemonic state, as guarantor of the coherence of the text/world whose imperial project is diversified but never challenged. This dynamic might in fact be best exemplified by the ways in which, as evidenced by the re-poaching of the poachers, the reformist aims of fan mediation seem inevitably to be subsumed under the authorial/authoritative frame of the textual producers, strengthening the authority of the author/state by appealing to its logics in service of incremental change.
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